Core i7 vs. Penryn vs. Phenom II with HD 4870-X2 & TriFire
Call of Juarez
Performing Call of Juarez benchmark is easy. You are presented with a simple menu to choose resolution, anti-aliasing, and two choices of shadow quality options. We set the shadow quality on “high” and the shadow map resolution to the maximum, 2048×2048. At the end of the run, the demo presents you with the minimum, maximum, and average frame rate, along with the option to quit or run the benchmark again. We always ran the benchmark at least a second time and recorded that generally higher score.
Here are Call of Juarez DX10 benchmark results at 1920×1200:
Call of Juarez shows very little performance differences between the two, three or four CPU cores or their core speed at 1920×1200 resolution with either the HD 4870-X2 or with Tri-Fire. Clearly framerates are mostly dependent on the graphics, not the CPU. Here you will have the similar results with the Phenom II at 3.1 GHz as the tri-core at 2.8 GHz or with the 920 i7 at 3.8 GHz.
Now on to 1650×1080 resolution:
Some of the CPUs at their stock speed are a little weaker than the faster CPUs in the game’s minimums and averages. However, there is really no practical difference in the game playing experience once the CPU is overclocked.
It really takes our multi-GPU video card to play Call of Juarez fully maxed out. The HD 4870-X2’s frame rates are completely satisfactory at 1920×1200 with completely maxed-out details and with 4xAA/16xAF applied with any of our CPUs. Clearly this game is dependent on the graphics once you get a reasonably fast CPU to pair it with.
Nice thorough testing. I think you should consider adding some GTA4 benchmarks to either this or future testing.
Thank-you. Perhaps in future I will add GTA4.
I have switched from Vista 64 to Win 7 64 and I am definitely adding a few new game benchmarks to my benchmarking suite after I am done with my CES articles. The only one that is certain AtM is L4D to replace Lost Coast.
Oh yeh for your charts you also have the 720 listed for all the AMD processors, when I’m sure you meant to say the 550 and 955. I mean I was able to figure out which is which by the X2, X3, and X4, but others might not.
You’re right and thank-you for pointing it out. It is somewhat funny that we all missed it, if quite embarrassing to me.
As soon as I catch up with my other articles on CES and GF-100 Fermi, I will redo those charts. I had a lot of trouble with the site and HTML errors and after they were fixed, this article got really hurried up for publication so as to be published before I left for CES.
The Phenom II CPUs are always in the same order (as determined by X2, X3, and X4):
550-X2
720-X3
955-X4